I removed "Part 2: Soil improvement and fertilisation" from the top. Part 2 of what? I think it's ISF Belgium, which should be stated in a notice - at the bottom is a good place. --Chriswaterguy 20:31, 10 July 2012 (PDT)
With these simple inorganic substances, plants build a wide variety of organic compounds as carbohydrates (sugars, starches, cellulose), fats, oils, proteins, ... This requires:
the absorption of CO2 by diffusion from the air entered through the plant's stomata
the absorption of water trough the roots by osmosis from the soil (water is transported via the half-permeable wall from the weakest to the strongest salt solution)
the absorption of salts: only possible if they are dissolved in soil water. Salts split apart in water into charged particles (ions). NaCl (table salt) splits apart into Na+ and Cl-. The absorption of salts can only be done through the form of ions. The uptake of ions occurs trough ion exchange. If the plant absorbs a positive ion, it will have to give up a positive ion. Conversely, he must give off a negative ion if it absorbs a negative ion. The absorption of a positive ion done by giving up an H+, the absorption of a negative ion is done by giving off a negative HCO3-.
I haven't gone through in detail - perhaps there is more to remove. --Chriswaterguy 20:31, 10 July 2012 (PDT)
This page is not about Soil quality, it appears to be from a basic course in soil science. Is it even opensource material? Joeturner 05:50, 10 February 2013 (PST)
KVDP translated it from a document belonging ISF Belgium (i.e. their EWB, Engineers Without Borders), with permission, if I'm not mistaken. It takes time to follow these things up and be sure we've got the permission right (as "sure you can use it" doesn't mean they've understood our open license. This is a problem... one of a few things we need to handle. At least I can tag it as having this issue, until we fix it. --Chriswaterguy 22:38, 10 February 2013 (PST)
Well, wherever it is from, I'm still asserting it is not about Soil Quality, which most Soil Scientists would argue is an assessment of the usability of a soil for a given purpose, or possibly the flexibility of a given soil for different purposes. As it stands, this page explains a bit about different characteristics of soils, but doesn't really say anything about how these factors can be considered to be affecting the quality of the soil. Some of it is clearly tangentially related - obviously a soil containing low levels of available nutrients is likely to be low quality when the objective is growing high yielding crops. I might have to have a look at the pages on soil and see how they fit together, but my general feeling is that a lot of this technical explanation is probably replicated somewhere else on appropedia and the page might be better served introducing the idea of Soil Quality and how it can be understood in different circumstances. Joeturner 00:32, 12 February 2013 (PST)
Sounds like this is your area... do you want to move it to a suitable title, e.g. soil science? --Chriswaterguy 22:16, 12 February 2013 (PST)
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